1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to locating information on a wide area network such as the Internet; and more particularly, to a method and system for organizing and displaying information about Internet Web sites on Web site maps.
2. Description of Related Art
The amount and variety of information accessible on the Internet, and in particular, through the World Wide Web, is now extremely vast and continues to grow very rapidly. At the same time, as the Internet grows in popularity, locating useful and accurate information on the Internet is becoming both more important and more challenging.
Various information services, such as search engines and Internet directories, have been developed to help Internet users locate information. Search engines and Internet directories are typically accessible through Web sites. Some Web sites provide access to multiple search engines, or to combinations of search engines and directories. Although they operate differently, search engines and directories all deliver their information in a similar format: as a list of URL's for selected websites (commonly called “hits”), organized by category and/or by search query. Typically, each hit is presented as a hyperlink on a Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML) results page produced by the search engine or directory. Such results pages often list other information about each hit, such as the Web site Meta Tags, and prioritize the hits using a variety of prioritization algorithms.
It is up to the person seeking information from the search engine or directory to determine which of the URL's on a results page points to a useful Web site. Commonly, the usefulness of a particular Web site can only be determined by connecting to the Web site through the hyperlink on the results page, reviewing the first linked page; reviewing a second page through a hyperlink found on the first linked page; reviewing a third page through a hyperlink found on the second linked page (or perhaps on the first linked page); and continuing the process of reviewing a Web site's hyperlinks until the desired information has been found or the search is abandoned. There are often delays associated with viewing Web pages in this manner because of the time required to transmit, receive, and display selected Web pages, and because of network errors, such as expired hyperlinks and unresponsive Web servers. Furthermore, if the desired information has not been found (which all too often is the case) through a first hyperlink, the user must then return to the results page to explore the other hyperlinks presented there. If the desired information is not found using the first results page, the user must formulate a second search, or run a search using a different search engine or different directory. Frequently, the process of running and exploring searches is very time consuming and requires much viewing of irrelevant or non-useful information.
Thus there is a need for a more efficient way to assess the information accessible through Web pages, and particularly when hyperlinks to a set of Web pages are presented as the results of a search run on an Internet search engine or directory.